Email might have been hacked! Ouch!

Boy we have heard this alot in our lifetime, “My email is not working!”  Well recently we have heard the following, “People are trying to send me emails and I don’t get them.”  Here are a few remedies.  1.  Check your Spam folder.  2.  Make sure they are using your correct email address and did not accidentally put an extra character in it.  3.  We need to make sure that certain providers are not blocking your mail for different reasons.  Recently we ran into a situation where a customer had their email account hacked and this is what happened. 

Account listed [deleted this]  have been hacked recently and used to send large volumes of spam from the server. This occurred because the accounts’ passwords were either hacked or stolen through malware or a trojan and the accounts need to be secured as soon as possible or this spam will continue to be sent from the server. The accounts should have their passwords reset to a much stronger password using the server’s own password generator or removed from the server, if the account is no longer being used.  Currently, we do not have any further information on how the passwords were stolen as the hackers were logging in directly through a mail client, which means they already had the passwords in their possession and there is no evidence of a brute force attack occurring. 

If this has resulted in blacklist issue(s) for your server, we are working to get these removed from public blacklists. However, there are certain private blacklists, such as those in use by many ISPs, that we cannot publicly query to see if the IP address is listed, so our detection tools will not show those listings. If you have bounce backs from such lists, please provide them as soon as possible so we can investigate and get those removed as well. Please note that blacklist issues do take time to resolve and are not immediately fixed simply by securing the hacked account identified above. Now that we’ve stopped the source of the spam and are working to get any publicly known blacklisting issues cleared up, email delivery will improve; however, it will not occur immediately nor in the span of a few hours. It typically takes a few days to clear up, sometimes longer depending on the source of the blacklist. We are working to get these cleared up but we do ask for your much appreciated patience in advance while we work on it as we are solely reliant on 3rd parties honoring our removal requests, and it is entirely up to them to either honor or deny those requests. We truly understand how important this is to get this fixed and we greatly appreciate your time once again. Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns.  How important it is to protect our passwords from the outside bandits!